QT 5 Will Be Available For Raspberry Pi

New submitter sirjohn writes with the good news that "A small group of ICS and Nokia engineers have started working on a minimal bootstrap to bring fully functional Qt 5" to the Raspberry Pi, writing "Do you want to create the next big thing on embedded devices and have $35 to invest? You can now have a complete development environment with accelerated graphics for basically nothing. I think it's a big deal ..." Plus, Nokia is funding 400 of the boards and looking for ideas (and developers) to use them. The competition is stiff; there are already quite a few impressive ideas listed.

QT is fine

[Daniel Phillips]

I like QT. It has become my GUI toolkit of choice. It does a lot to help you write rich interfaces with sensible defaults. It is no mean feat to reconcile those two. Recent versions have an awful lot of shiny gizmos under the hood, a full featured animation framework for example. Very few complaints. Except the MOC. Approaches like sigc++ or Boost signals are much better than the half baked preprocessor hackery. Given that QT breaks compatibility badly with each major release anyway, how about putting less effort into justifying that entrenched silliness and think about moving into the 21st century?

Re:QT is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt 5 is about a *minimal* break in compatibility between Qt 4[1], so your suggestion of "breaking compatibility badly" was rather poorly researched.

As for hating on moc... moc is not just for signals! I hear this sort of thing repeated time and time again, and it's clear that every time, people do not do their homework. When you can come up with a solution that can provide at least these capabilities, feel free to suggest it for Qt 6, and better still, offer a patch.

- qobject_cast, a dynamic_cast which works across module boundaries (and doesn't use RTTI)
- the meta object system, allowing you to introspect objects at runtime, think of something like C#'s reflection - take a look at things like QMetaObject[2] and QMetaMethod[3], etc.
    this includes runtime creation of instances of a given class, looking up a method by name and invoking it with random arguments, etc...
- the properties system (Q_PROPERTY), allowing things like QML to set properties on C++ objects from javascript
- signals and slots

[1]: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Qt5.pdf
[2]: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qmetaobject.html
[3]: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qmetamethod.html

Which area of the market?

[derGoldstein]

This seems like it could blow the Arduino out of the water, at least the higher-end ones (including the ones that are currently being developed). If you can get full C++ and some actual computing power (I mean as opposed to the no-OS MCUs), and a mature IDE that'll facilitate designing GUIs, it would definitely change a few things. The Beagle Board team will also have to start rethinking the current design, since its current cheap model is $90.

And yes, I know that the Arduino as a software platform (and the IDE) isn't going anywhere, and that's great, but their plans to design higher-end models will have a very difficult time competing with a $35, QT-programmable board.

How is this news?

[shish]

Surely any well written software should *already* run on the Pi? It's just a standard linux install, the only problem would be if your code was very hardware-specific, and I'm not sure why a GUI library would be...